Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. Erica JongHundreds of years before Jesus was born, when the Old Testament was still under revision in a fairly primitive and tenuous Palestinian culture, the Greeks were reaching a zenith of art, literature and philosophy.
To live without love is a mistake for which there is no reparation, neither in this life nor in the life to come. Søren Kierkegaard
In the fourth century before the common era, Plato wrote the first truly great and classic works of western philosophy. His life's work makes an impressive collection of dialogues. Unlike most of the philosophy assignments I had to study, Plato did us the favor of writing his material in the form of conversations. They read something like a play in which different characters carry certain roles in the unfolding of Plato's thoughts. His beloved teacher, Socrates, is the character that gets all of the good lines and great ideas.
You sometimes have to pay attention to the setting of a conversation, whether it is day or night, whether they were in Athens, the home of all great thought, or elsewhere, where conversations might be a bit less informed or insightful.
But you especially have to pay attention to when he gives lines to someone we know Plato despised. And he despised no one more than the Greek playwright, Aristophanes. Aristophanes had libeled Socrates in his plays, perhaps leading the generally dismissive view that his fellow Athenians had of him, making it possible for the city government to condemn Socrates to death.
I don't want to play armchair psychologist across the distance of some 2300 years, but I find it to be curious that the only time that Plato brings up the subject of love relationships, that he gives most of the lines to the hated Aristophanes. So it is hard to tell how seriously that Plato wants to take the recounted myth that Aristophanes describes in the Symposium but at the very least, it is reflective of a very ancient understanding of why people seem so determined to sacrifice their freedom, independence, and often their happiness to be connected to another person.
The myth that Aristophanes retells is basically this: Originally all humans had two heads and two sets of genitals, and four arms and four legs. There were three different kinds of people. Some had two sets of female genitals, some had two sets of male genitals, and some had one set of male genitals and one set of female genitals. And this paragraph alone, my friends, more than doubles the total number of times that I have said the word "genitals" in a sermon in the past 30 years.
Because some of the humans were becoming too aggressive with the gods, the gods decided to split them into two, making them much weaker and much less of a threat to the gods. The end result of this tragic event is that all humans spend their lives looking for their other half. Note that in this ancient myth, if you do the math on this one evenly, there are more men looking for a male partner, and more women looking for a female partner, than there are men and women looking for an opposite sex partner. I don't know if that says something about Ancient Greece or about Aristophanes or about all of us, but no matter how you divide up the math, the myth is intended to state that no single individual is ever whole without his or her other half.
I hope that we have long ago dispensed with any sense that because some source is ancient that it is somehow magically superior and insightful. More often than not, the opposite is more likely to be the case. However, this bit of philosophical whimsy from Plato's pen can tell us two things, not the least of which is that same sex relationships are perfectly normal and have been a part of human coupling from the dawn of humanity.
A fact which is especially interesting in this particular year because after a lifetime of fighting for gay rights, we finally got legal same sex marriage in all of these United States, and I mean, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and though they were sometimes little jerks about it, even in Kentucky. And that only happened about six months ago and no one talks about it anymore because it was, is, and always has been, perfectly normal and nothing to discuss. It all happened so fast that we almost forgot to be happy about it.
The other thing we see in this myth is that there is a long-standing awareness that somehow we are drawn to live in marital unions. For most of human history this was a matter of economic necessity and survival. When most of humanity was dependent upon agriculture, it took a partnership with kids spread out over the decades to have adequate labor and mutual support to make society work.
Civilization became deeply entrenched in gender specific roles around labor, childcare, education, and even retirement. A hundred and fifty years of my patriarchal family existed almost every day of their lives on a farm in Kentucky where the house was near the spring, the church was at the end of the lane, and the graveyard was on a hilltop between the house and the church. Most of the world worked more or less in just that way for most of human history.
We are not, most of us, tethered to a parcel of land. Having children not only does not enhance our economic stability but, in fact, the people who never had kids are the only ones who ever seem to have any money! In the past half-century, we have seen that women don't necessarily need a man to support them or even to help them to raise children. Single mothers raised both our current president and our previous democratic president. It not only can be done, it can be done very successfully.
I had primary care of my daughter for her entire life but especially after she was five years old, and I have to tell you that she is very nearly perfect. I was told when we applied for her citizenship that she could never be president because she wasn't born in the USA but since that fact hasn't stopped Ted Cruz from running... I'm not so sure anymore. Anyway, clearly, men can get along quite handsomely without a female partner as well.
We don't have to have a spouse to run the farm, or even to have and raise children. And, though this may be a more delicate topic to treat in this context, we don't have to have a spouse to have a sex life. Statistics still indicate that married people have more frequent sex than single people do, in spite of the myths on both sides of that matrimonial fence, but even among fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases seems to be about the same as among non-believers so while there is a whole lot of deception and outright lying going on, pretty much, everyone is involved to one degree or another.
It is a recent development, in terms of the history of civilization, but it is a pronounced change. We no longer need to be married for economic reasons or for sexual reasons, or even for procreation.
So why do people continue to seek their other half? The poet and novelist, Erica Jong, said it very simply: Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.
Now, she is married to her fourth husband and she has written novels about the first three so I bet number four his holding on to the end. But the mere fact that a relationship doesn't last forever does not mean that it did not have its moment in the sun. Success is not always defined in terms of permanence.
When marriage also included the powerful concerns of economic survival, agricultural food security, safety of a family and mutual support in old age, people probably adjusted their expectations about emotional fulfillment accordingly. You cannot escape the fact that religious norms evolved to lock people into stable marriages for the benefit of society...not for the benefit of making two people unhappily stay together.
Now, coupling is a rather more exacting proposal. People do not especially need another person but there is still that open wound from when Zeus cut us in two that makes us remain on the lookout for our other half. But now it is about love, it is about meaning, companionship, shared values and mutual emotional support more than it is getting the laundry done, the crops harvested, and getting the kids raised.
I have taken today to be publicly philosophical on a topic about which I am more the perpetual spectator than I am a participant but love in the 21st century does seem to be a topic that demands thoughtful analysis. Still, talking about it is sort of like a TV commercial for a perfume or cologne.
As we get close to Christmas, all of the men's and women's fragrance companies are advertising their wares heavily but you will notice that not one of the commercials uses a single adjective that has anything to do with their product. They don't talk about their product having a spicy or flowery smell, they don't talk about their fragrance at all, which is odd since fragrance is what they have to sell. But rather they try to project masculinity to men, femininity to women, and sexual desirability to both.... All things that you cannot get from a bottle of fragrance.
We talk about sex, on our better days we talk about friendship, companionship, but what we want defies description. We want what love makes us feel but all of our language ends up talking about things that are inevitably less than that feeling.
Søren Kierkegaard, who may have been the smartest man to live in modern times, never married. He was in love. He was even engaged for a time, but he didn't believe that he could make Regine happy, and so he broke off the engagement and, it is safe to say from his books and his journal, he never stopped regretting that decision.
He made the entry in his journal that you heard read a few moments ago... a stand alone sentence, "To live without love is a mistake for which there is no reparation, either in this life nor in the life to come." For all of the richness of intellect, and the satisfaction of his very meaningful life as an author, he knew that there was a void that so eluded him that he never found it, and I might add my own belief that the want of it is what caused him to die at such a young age.
I have been single for most of my adult life and I can say, in spite of the occasional solitude and inconvenience of single life, that it is a heck of a lot better than living with the wrong person. Still, like everyone else who has lived alone for a long time, you always existentially know that there is a void that wants to be filled.
Those of us who are single often do pity many of the married people we know who seem to be trapped or stuck in an unhappy union. And many married people look at those of us who are single as projects who need to be fixed. There is nothing wrong with spending your entire life as a single person, but I suspect that there has never been anyone who did who would not gladly have traded their solo act for a meaningful partnership had the opportunity ever presented itself.
I think that many of us who have tried and failed to find the right person may suffer from excesses of perfectionism and a kind of idealistic view of marriage that defies the reality of mere mortals. Many of what we would call successful marriages have survived through the years for no reason other than obstinacy, they just refused to give up!
You look at some of the most wealthy, beautiful, and successful couples in the world and you find out that it just isn't easy for anyone. The famous actor, Will Smith, recently said about his 20 year long marriage to actress, Jada, "It's like our marriage was the most difficult, grueling, excruciating thing that we have ever taken on in our lives. And you know we're just not quitters."
I know that he didn't say that as an indictment of those of us who have given up on past relationship though there is a none-too subtle reality to it. It is like this, as the novelist, Ursula LeGuin, said:
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. That is, you don't find love.... We look for it, we look for the perfect partner, the right partner, the other half, but any successful relationship is made, and remade, literally renegotiated to give it new life and purpose.
My marriage and family professor told us 30 years ago that a marriage has to be totally recreated approximately every seven years or it will die from being stale and irrelevant. I'm afraid that advice may have become, in and of itself, stale and irrelevant because the world is changing so fast now. I suspect that relationships probably need to remain rather dynamic, constantly changing, being renegotiated, fed, renewed, to continue to have a meaningful life.
I have to stop these musings at some point so I will try to conclude with this: Marriage is no longer a necessary institution in our time. It is not economically, agriculturally, or even pro-creatively vital, and yet it remains mysteriously desirable as an existential partnership in the face of the inky blackness and isolation of the universe. Being married doesn't make you happy unless you put happiness into it. Being married doesn't give life meaning, unless you continually bring new meaning to it. And being married shouldn't be a lifetime bondage unless both parties remain stubbornly willing to make it more than an economic roommate sort of dependence.
Whatever the mysterious core of true love is, that part that defies adjectives, religion, contracts, or rules, it is not something you find... it is something you make and so, in a word, I'm simply encouraging you to make love and I hope that you will not try to misinterpret that.
